When You Are Beaten
by KayLeFay
Summary: Irene Adler. The name goes onto the notepad in sluggish lower case, as though Sally hadn't seen it, pulsing red excitement across the front page of every tabloid.
1. Chapter 1

She's dressed for him because he doesn't care, because when she arrives he'll be spinning in codes and asteroids and Sherlock Holmes and she's just another distraction.

He's wearing Dior. He doesn't ask her to sit.

"You weren't lying," he says, and he closes his eyes.

Irene looks around the office, the hedged rows of sheet music and treatises on obscure mathematical phenomena, the sturdy whiteness of the walls. "Don't tell me you're disappointed," she says.

"I don't have to tell you anything."

He's scrolling through the lines of code on her phone, eyes still closed but moving, flitting mechanically over the patterns she knows are written into his brain.

Frankly, she's seen people pick out drapes with more enthusiasm.

"I thought Sherlock Holmes might be interested," she says.

James Moriarty looks up and his eyes are dull, pupils stretched thin. He puts down the phone, hands moving through space as slowly as if it were honey. "You interrupted my conversation with Sherlock Holmes…to talk about Sherlock Holmes?"

She stands a bit straighter. "You know how to play the Holmes boys."

He smiles. "Well, it's hardly a challenge, is it?"

"You don't really want that to be true."

"And you do," he says.


	2. Chapter 2

They find Sherlock on the floor of 44 Belgrave Square, lead-limbed and half conscious, mumbling unhappily at Watson's various creative attempts to sit him up.

Two shots fired in the poshest block in Westminster, thinks Sally, of course Holmes is involved. "Heroin?" Sally asks, nodding her head in his direction. "Rohypnol? Valium?"

Watson glares at Sally from under Freak's arm as he again attempts to hoist him into a seated position. "He was drugged."

"I can see that."

She crosses her arms and smiles at them both, and Holmes musters the energy to sneer back, if a bit droopily. A member of the armed response team pokes his head around the door, wary-this man, with years of experience in hostage negotiation, unwilling to disturb the margins of any room containing the Freak-and says, "All clear, Detective Sergeant."

"Could use a little help here," grunts Watson, tugging at his collar to free it from Holmes' fluttering grasp, but the man is gone.

And she doesn't like Holmes, doesn't like how he barrels past the protocols enforced by a system predisposed to listen to everything he says just because he bears the marks of inherited success, but she can't watch him anymore.

He's buried his face in the carpet, the lush fringe surrendering to his cheekbones, and Sally drops into a squat and tucks a hand under his back to sit him up. "He's going to have to come in tomorrow," she tells Watson, and the doctor exhales like he's counting the seconds.

Holmes flops into her arms with a muttered "unusually incompetent."

"I'll try to bring him in by five," says Watson.

She manages to get Freak into an upright position and passes him off to John. "Four thirty," she says, and she's down the stairs before he can object.

Dimmock is interviewing one of the first responders when Sally nudges him with her elbow. He flicks his gaze to her momentarily but doesn't interrupt himself. Sally looks past him to the empty sitting room, at the blood inked onto the carpet, the echoes of bodies in violent motion. Bodies that are, she notes, decidedly missing from the scene.

The responder looks a bit pissed off when Dimmock concludes the interview-Sally guesses this has more to do with Watson's steadfast insistence on bringing Freak straight home without a visit to the A&E-and turns to Sally. "Talk to the woman upstairs?"

"She awake?"

He raises his eyebrows, and it's as good a dismissal as any. She grabs at the mahogany banister and launches herself back up the stairs with a bit-back grumble, and yes, she's awake, the woman upstairs, awake and standing to the side of the room, shoulders covered with a blanket from the response van. The orange of the fabric strikes sickeningly against her red hair, but she's got a silk tie and blouse and matching smart little skirt and if it were anywhere else, Sally would be happy to talk to her.

"Did they get you tea?"

The redhead massages the juncture between her neck and left shoulder with a delicate hand and closes her eyes briefly before looking up at Sally. "There's always tea," she says, "I hardly need more."

Sally smiles at that. "Most people like something to stare at."

"Oh, I'm fine."

The way she says it tilts the edges of the words into something not quite crime-scene appropriate, and Sally's wondering about her because sometimes flirting after a murder is shock, and sometimes it's sociopathic. "I'm Detective Sergeant Donovan. Is it all right if I ask you a few questions?"

"Of course," she says, and her smile is slight and shows the tips of her front teeth.

"Are you sure? You can come down to the station if you'd feel more comfortable."

"Really, Sergeant, it's okay."

Sally digs her notepad out of her back pocket, uncaps her pen. She should offer the woman a seat, but she's standing too still and Sally's sure there's something under it if she can just keep watching her. "Can you tell me why you were at 44 Belgrave Square today?"

"I work here."

Sally writes the words slowly, deliberately, even though she could have guessed as much and her employer besides. She watches the woman for signs of impatience. "Can you tell me about your job?"

"Personal assistant."

"I'm sorry, you're going to have to be more specific. Who do you work for?"

The woman laughs like the sound surprises her. "You don't know? Oh, bless. Irene Adler."

The name goes onto the notepad in sluggish lower case, as though Sally hadn't seen it, pulsing and red excitement across the front page of every tabloid."Do you know Ms. Adler's current whereabouts?"

"I couldn't tell you, I'm sorry. I work from a distance as often as not."

"Was she in the building at any point today?"

"I don't believe so, no."

It's quick and steady and Sally knows it's not true. She writes it down. "Can I have your name?"

There's a spattering of freckles across her nose, soft under the powder she wears and the front-teeth smile is back. "Kate Moran."

"We'll let you know if we need to speak with you again," Sally tells her, and the notebook is in her back pocket again and she's not sure what to tell Dimmock.


End file.
